Will road widening on Pune roads solve the purpose?

PMC mulls over widening stretch between Ghole Road and Modern College to ease traffic congestion

Pune: To ease the traffic congestion on internal roads parallel to Jangli Maharaj (JM) Road, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is planing to widen the stretch connecting Ghole Road and Modern College.

Since the two arterial roads namely JM Road and Naamdar Gopal Krishna Gokhale (FC) Road were made one-way a few years back, the internal roads between these two major roads started experiencing repeated traffic jams. Even the vehicles parked on the internal roads causes slow moving traffic in the area.

To ease the traffic problem on this road and pave way for smooth traffic to some extent, local corporator Siddharth Shirole moved a proposal before the civic body asking it to widen the existing road from 7.5 metre to 9 metre. According to the proposal, the road should be widened by 0.75 metre on both sides.

Since the traffic department started making arterial roads one-way, internal roads started experiencing heavy vehicular movement. Due to this, many of the internal roads were also made one-way but that also did not solve the problem. In fact, the violation of traffic norms increased manifold.

However, as parking has been made available on the entire stretch connecting Ghole Road and Modern College, it is doubtful whether road widening will solve the problem. Widening of the road is a daunting task for the PMC as both sides of the road accommodate PMC-approved constructions.

Sakal Times tried to contact Shirole, but he was not available for the comment.